Tools, Dials & unexpected Levers

Month: April 2016

Once you decided to go under the surface of “news”, there are many ways to explore the movie history. I once imagined I explored a year of cinema : let’s begin with 1960. Let’s watch Psycho, l’Avventura, La Dolce Vita, Elmer Gantry, Exodus and The Magnificent Seven…

There’s another way. Which is to find the author. My best choice (from far) has been Tennessee Williams. You can watch : A Tramway Named Desire, The Night of the Iguana, Suddenly Last Summer or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tatoo, This Property is Condemned or Baby Doll (there are more, but these are masterpieces).

Like this:

When you talk with these people, you have a strange (et délicieux) feeling : some inner parts of you, of your mind are… activated.

(It happens, sometimes, that you trigger the same effect in response)

You can use subtle metaphors to explain this, like surprisingly finding inner gold, or opening unknown windows, new stairs… thanks dear !

I do think that some parts of our brain are sleeping, or are “put in a box”, useless. Sometimes you don’t even know or remember that they’re here, in a corner of your attic.

When they’re activated : you are surprised, thankful, you see and feel them blossoming around, in you. It gives you a big amount of energy and happiness.

When you activate them (by doing nothing but being yourself in a conversation) in your chatterboxing partner’s mind, you can see this person like… floored-with-a-smile.

If this person dies, or flies away, you feel a bit strange or sick for a moment, because, as you can guess, these golden activities which liked to dance in your head, they want to dance more, and they can’t.

The bond only could make them dance. Conversations.

Some parts are real gold, they stay : you can keep them for you, you grew, that’s your new treasure, votre nouveau trésor !

Some parts begin to hurt you, though. They dance alone, lost in your mind, they hit walls, they break themselves. They wait.

You have to use the old boxes.

These sleeping parts of you, made alive, have to go back to sleep, “Off to box, chatterbox !”. Your pie gets smaller.

Waldgänger is a german word we could translate as “Forest Goer”. It’s a state of mind archetype, an inner way of standing in life. It means : staying where you are, but you don’t believe in what you live anymore…

Wald means “forest” – a Walgänger is someone who retreats into the forest.

Many similar representations exist, and are more common. In fact, to define what a Waldgänger is, it’s maybe easy to tell what it is not…

It’s not a rebel (against), nor an otaku (cut), nor an ermite (far). You don’t go away. You just retreat inside. And you stay there. You are different, suddenly, but nobody knows it.

You become a Waldgänger when you step aside inside of your mind. You are stuck into a game, a situation, and you don’t believe in it anymore. You make “as if”, but inside of you, you are out. You watch. Maybe you contemplate the disaster. You don’t play the game anymore. Or as if. And you know what : you are invisible. It can happen to you, but you can decide it, too. It’s maybe a struggle with yourself (“Protect me from what I want”, says Jenny Holzer). You don’t tell.

#womanonbicycle

Tool provided by Nietzsche :

a kind of most profound self-reflection and self-recovery that desires to avoid, not “temptations,” but “duties”: an escape from the daily round; a detachment from the tyranny of stimuli and influences that condemns us to spend our strength in nothing but reactions and does not permit their accu- mulation to the point of spontaneous activity

The other one is easy, logical : you become a Waldgänger to avoid becoming crazy. It’s a inner retreat. You don’t move, you don’t “quit”, you don’t rebel : you watch and don’t believe in what to see. And nobody knows it. Waldgänger state is alone. But you can think…

WhatsApp is a perfect App, so elegant that more than a billion people on Earth use it. I loved it the first minute it was on my phone. I was floored by everything in this App : clean, elegant, simple.

More : Internet, Facebook and some Apps on our smartphones allow us to meet people all around the world.

There is a great exercise you can make with someone living in another country. I call it WhatsApp Ping Pong.

You send a picture to this person, and you wait for the answer. It can be ten seconds later, or ten hours, or ten days. The purpose, to maintain a good pace, is to wait for the image-answer before you send another one.

Your books, the sky, a church, walls, houses, streets : EVERYTHING is interesting, when you watch it from another culture. Voilà.

And if you want, if you’re shy, you don’t need a single word, you ping pong images, only images. This App is such a great tool. That’s sharing. That’s humanity !